Menu

Chunk Diaries: Looking back on August and September 2013 at The Chunk

This post deals with when I started at The Chunk, in late August 2013.

It started with an IRC conversation with vemacs. Someone was looking for some assistance with a plugin. I said I'd fix it.

I was dropped into a Skype group conversation (which still exists as the core team chat) and I went to business working on MinerWare. The plugin was not well written back then. Even Mac said the developer was gone. (Turns out, he (Sam) was there all along, and we welcomed them back on board in November 2013, and subsequently created DoubleTrouble and BlockWars. But now I'm simply ruining the story.) vemacs and I pushed on until we essentially had a backend redo. Then we started on it and we found several grave problems:

There was one box to a game.

The code quality was mixed at best.

The boxes ran servers in screen sessions (which is just asking for disaster).

The boxes ran CentOS.

The boxes were not properly secured.

That's when we set to work on the boxes. Several days later, we had a new configuration:

All games connected to a shared instance of MariaDB.

Plenty of code was rewritten and optimized.

Several boxes were made redundant.

All boxes now ran Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Multiple BungeeCords were set up (initially with BungeeCountSync, replaced with RedisBungee later).

This kept everything stable for a while. Next time, I'm going to revisit RedisBungee.